America Causes Cancer

Hispanics living in Florida have a 40 percent higher cancer risk than those who live in their native countries. A new study reconfirms previous findings (with Japanese) that Americans have a carcinogenic way of life.

Is there any logical connection between what really threatens American lives and the money spent defending against these dangers?

The U.S. spent $636,292,979,000 last year on military expenditures (presumably defending the nation against terrorists and Russians). Total U.S. spending on medical research was about $95 billion, about 1/7th the money that went to the military.

Yet a study published in 2002, found about a quarter million Americans die each year from avoidable causes—things that proper medical care would have detected and treated. How many died from terrorist attacks?

The Urban Institute has estimated that about 22,000 Americans die annually simply because they lack health care. That's about seven times the total toll from 9/11 every year.

We're spending over $630 billion on guns, missiles, and bombs every year, but can't afford less than $1 trillion (over ten years) to insure every American? Really?

How much would we spend on the CIA and arms if our enemies were killing 22,000 Americans every year?

Any country that spends far more defending itself against largely imaginary enemies as it does against the real causes of death is no better than the fools who cut down the last trees on Easter Island so they could erect a few more statues. A culture collapsing under the weight of its own inescapable fantasies.

Update: Numbers corrected. Sorry, I get lost at anything over a hundred billion!

This rant which aims the blame for cancer rates at America's expenditure on military efforts is naive and ridiculously incorrect. From the dawn of time when man began setting boundaries around his family camp, issues of "protection" came first and foremost...above hunting/gathering, above grinding grain, above tanning animal hides, above teaching children skills of survival. Above all, man had to protect what was his from what was "out there". It is what it is.

Fast forward to Old Testament Egypt. The beautiful hieroglyphs that remain for us to study depict huge military undertakings in efforts to protect the Egyptian way of life and to acquire neighboring rival territories. It is what it is.

Fast forward to Roman Empire in its hay day...or to the Mongol expansion with Genghis Khan...or to Germany's Hitler...the American Revolutionary War...World War I and II...the American Civil War...the Alamo...etc, etc, etc. All were military efforts to preserve territory, to gain territory, to fight for rights, and an enduring battle to be the victor...the strongest of the strong. It is what it is.

It is ridiculous to blame the American military effort for cancer rates when history dictates that man and their countries will always be flexing their military muscles. Yes, America has a huge issue with health care (so do other countries), cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. The answer to most of these problems can be found in each individuals personal life style choices. Inactivity, diet choices, and exposure to cancerous substances(diet soda, pesticides, tobacco, preservatives, etc) all are larger contributors to the cancer epidemic in American than are all the dollars being spent on national security. Do you have any idea how dramatically all those statistics would drop if each American would stop eating potato chips forever and take a walk every day? Dramatically. Why not blame the Department of Education and its lack luster campaign on exercise programs in public schools? Why not blame advertisers and all the money they spend on commercials to entice us to eat their fast food? There are tons of people to blame for our own personal problems. Hmmm....maybe that's the problem.

(Statistics... what a wonderfully manipulative tool to sway anyone to believe anything you want them to...)

You fail to realize that your example bespeaks the very point Christopher Ryan was making, that since the dawn of time we have had to "protect what was his from what was out there," why then would we not protect against the most likely causes of mortality? Viruses are out there. Cancers are out there. They pose a threat. Does the fact that they are not sentient make them less fun to kill? Does the fact that HIV doesn't have a religion of its own make it a less attractive target? If cancer could speak, would we then finally do something about destroying it? Why is it that we build walls around our families to keep out other humans and supposed dangers, all the while being eaten alive by things within not just the walls of our compound, but the walls of our cells? Viruses are plotting against us, cancer has infiltrated our castles and has planted bombs and IEDs, bacteria has insulted your mother and keeps saying anti-semitic and racist crap, heart disease told me you look like a dork just before it kicked my dog and revealed a plot to nuke the capital. Do we want to kill it now? How about if viruses, under a microscope, wear tiny turbans/swastikas/satanic emblems and treat the women of their culture disrespectfully? Will we kill it now? The fact that we presume bacteria feel no pain makes them less fun to kill...

1. Your understanding of war in prehistory is mistaken. There is little, if any, evidence of serious group-level conflict before about 10,000 years ago (the rise of agriculture).

2. You completely missed my point. I wasn't arguing that the military causes cancer, but that we spend disproportionate amounts of money on military "defense" against enemies far less lethal than cancer, heart disease, and other killers. If our budgeting were rational, these proportions would be far different.

3. I agree with your points about personal responsibility, and I think advertisers (and the corporations who employ them) are worthy of a lot of blame for the present situation.

Right you are, SteveM. Got lost in all the zeroes. There's a link at the one trillion health care figure, which explains where it comes from (Congressional estimates of total expenditures over a decade). Now I'm off to take my anti-apoplexy medication. Good thing I'm insured!

But Christopher you are also making the mistake of equating spending with service delivery. Comparing health care spending to Defense is a red herring. You could make the same comparison with ridiculous agricultural subsidies or any other of the myriad ways in which the government wastes tons of money. ($500 million just appropriated for new Congressional junket jets BTW.)

America already spends a lot more per capita on health care than any other country. It's not how much we spend on health care, it's how we spend it.

Why throw another trillion dollars at a system that is busted? And the Obama plan is busted out of the chute by the very fact that he needs the additional trillion to make it work.

And conservatives constantly point to defective aspects of the Canadian and British health systems. Bad mouthing the Brits is not a substitute for a plan.

What about the German system? That's privatized and it works. Not perfectly, but it works. The conservative demand for perfect is the enemy of good enough. Why not use that as a point of departure? I don't get it.

I'm fascinated by the stupid pathology of a Washington (where I live) that thinks it must create an entirely new health care model out of whole cloth. Without examining systems that do work. OBTW, make the health care bill at least 1,000 pages so nobody care read it before they vote on it.

I don't think Washington is trying to create an entirely new health care system. Congressmen (esp. those in the House) are probably the most cynical and practical about what can and can't be achieved with legislation (and how to achieve it) because their very jobs consist of putting band-aids on and taking band-aids off of various problems -- there are no clean, easy fixes. Every single Congressmen realizes that the real work is incredibly messy and no health care legislation will completely replace our current system. Pelosi and Boehner and Reid and McConnell may sound stupid and like they're trying to approach the health care debate in an overly simplistic way but behind the scenes they're making all kinds of deals and practical revisions for consensus. However, those little practical deals and revisions along the way rarely add up to a wholly practical plan. Like always, we'll just have to wait and see what comes out of all this debate.

Re: "However, those little practical deals and revisions along the way rarely add up to a wholly practical plan."

That's an understatement. We're looking at a health care equivalent of the US Tax Code!

BTW, Pelosi, Boehner, Reid, et al. not only sound stupid. They are stupid. Which would be fine if they weren't being stupid with our money. (You thinks the half a billion for those corporate jets is smart?)

I think $636,292,979,000 is 636 billion, not trillion...so that's 636/95 ~= 6.7 times more. That's not nearly as ridiculous. Personally I think $1 trillion for national health care isn't too much, especially since the benefits include many more people than Bush's Medicare Drug Benefit passed back in 2003, which cost about that much.

But as the above poster has commented, there's something to be said for personal responsibility for one's own health. Also, you're suggesting that all that money would be much better spent on research. Imagine if we spent $0 on the military. You say we spend too much, but there's no way to know how many lives are being saved, only how many are lost when we don't spend that much. Again, I also do not like a big military, but your article's logic isn't right.

Rebecca, your "It is what it is" argument is a pretty terrible one. For example, men have oppressed women as second-class citizens for centuries. That doesn't mean it shouldn't change. And also, many other developed countries have pretty decent healthcare, like Canada. You can't pin America's higher illness rates solely on personal life choices.

You got trillions and billions mixed up. America spends over $630 billion a year, not trillion, on military expenditures. And America spends less than $1 billion a year for medical research. The United States' GDP is around $13 or $14 trillion, so it would be impossible for us to spend 50 times more than that on military means alone each year. These numbers are still incredible though, and I agree that American culture is screwed up. I don't want this to sound extreme (but of course it will), but terrorists hate America for a logical reason. Obviously, resorting to terrorism and the murder of innocent people is completely wrong and shouldn't be condoned (and the mistreatment of women, etc. practiced by these groups of religious extremists is completely wrong as well). But America is hated because people around the world recognize that we have a destructive culture that is simultaneously highly addictive. They know that it's incredibly difficult to avoid capitalism's gravitational pull. Democracy is obviously something worth keeping around, but capitalism in it's purest form causes insane inequalities and has pitted human beings against each other in a death match that could destroy our species altogether. We're all so worried about making money, getting what we want when we want it, living longer, consuming, etc. that we've become an emotionally and socially stupid culture whose people are depressed, full of anxiety, spiritually empty, materialistic, overweight, and/or addicted to work or something else. We're now being driven by this paranoid, frenzied culture of ours at a breakneck speed and we have no control anymore.

I agree with these sentiments, though I think another reason the U.S. is resented in many parts of the world is precisely because the unleashed capitalism you describe finances the military expenditures needed to defend this modern-day colonialism. People understand that the U.S. props up dictatorships, as long as they cooperate with multinational corporations that extract local resources. It's hard to find anyone outside of the U.S. who actually believes that American military force is used to "defend freedom" as opposed to assuring security for globalized capitalism that leaves them impoverished and abused by corrupt government.

Having said that, I think your argument is more compelling and original.

What are you nuts!? The military is a great operationally, but it absolutely stinks as a "business".

The biggest political crime committed by the Bush administration was the cultivation of "Military Exceptionalism". I.e., Marshall sensibilities embody all that is good and true.

All that mindset got us was wars to nowhere and craptastic DoD budgets festooned with bloated, unaffordable weapons platforms. A guy wears a uniform and claims omniscience about foreign policy and managing the Merchants of Death business. And America has to cow tow to that? Puhleeze...